Charlemagne: Empire and Society

"This is a nice book for people who want a taster menu of Charlemagne. It consists of relatively short chapters on interesting aspects of Charlemagne and his world. It is a book aimed at beginners. I think it is the most recent and most accessible book of its kind on the market today. This book is from 2005 and was intended to showcase the state of debate and of knowledge at the time. The ninth chapter in the book, written by Rosamond McKitterick, is on the Carolingian renaissance of culture and learning. That is a big debate at the moment because this idea of a ‘renaissance’ is hard to maintain. There is a question about whether we should be talking about ‘reform’ or ‘ correctio ’ instead. “We have a few hundred Merovingian manuscripts left, written over a period of 250 years. Then, in the 150 years of the Carolingian period, you get 8,000 or 9,000 books remaining” There is a question about whether this cultural flowering in Charlemagne’s day was about people at the court becoming very clever and sophisticated, without the rest of the empire noticing—this old idea that it is a small, elite phenomenon. More recent work has shown that this was not at all about elite culture, but part of a much broader idea of wanting to lead a whole population to salvation, for which they needed books. And these books needed to be everywhere, even in small churches and small villages. Yes, legal systems, educational systems. Books are a symptom of the bigger story. We have a few hundred Merovingian manuscripts left, written over a period of 250 years. Then, in the 150 years of the Carolingian period, you get 8,000 or 9,000 books remaining. And of course that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There was an explosion in book production, which is the result of a new and intensified interest in knowledge. I think that is one of the most important things to remember. These Carolingian people were addicted to interesting texts about more or less anything and everything, and especially things that could be used to teach because, if you want to lead a whole population to salvation, you need to be able to explain exactly what Christianity is about. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It can be about very simple things, like whether you can wash your hair on Sundays. A farmer might ask his priest, who needs to know what to answer. The answer is, ‘no, unless it’s an emergency’ —and it’s the same for washing your feet. The question behind it all is, ‘what does Sunday rest mean? Is washing your feet work?’ A lot of thinking had to go into questions like that and, as a result, a lot of Roman jurisprudence was brought into the Carolingian Empire and copied and studied and thought about. You need educated people to make decisions and to teach people how to be good Christians, Franks and subjects. You see a bit of how the Franks tried to pick up the great ideas that the Romans had. Written law is a good thing because then you can look stuff up. That led to the creation of books of written law. Those are very handy for counts and other people who do the judging locally. It was decided quite early on in Charlemagne’s reign that every distinct group was allowed to have their own law. So the Lombards, Saxons, Franks and Frisians all had their own law. And the copying of these laws and the making available of all these books is certainly part of the story of this ‘renaissance’. Yes, but you can’t really talk about ‘the secular’ in this period because Christianity is like a big umbrella that stands over every aspect of your life. It’s a code of behaviour that covers all aspects of daily life. Also, most people who wrote were clerical people. There were some non-clerical people who wrote poetry, jokes, letters and things like that. Maybe the best example in this context is Einhard himself, Charlemagne’s biographer. He went to a monastic school but he stayed secular, married and became one of the most important advisors to Charlemagne. Are there great works of art that are not in-your-face religious? Yes. For instance, there are fantastic manuscripts about astronomy, the stars and the constellations, beautifully illustrated, probably copied from later Roman examples. The first bits of old high German poetry appear. But this is, I think, more an expression of a greater interest in literacy and in knowledge, than being part of a ‘renaissance’. People were very interested in Roman literature, pre-Christian or Christian. But the reasons for that were very different and it wasn’t a question of reviving Roman paganism. They admired people who wrote beautiful Latin and wonderful stories and thought they could learn a lot from that. If it got too dodgy, they probably wouldn’t let their young students read it. They’d be careful about who they showed the Ars Amatoria to. There was no hesitancy about pre-Christian authors, but there was a sort of ‘handle with care’ awareness, not wanting to put the wrong ideas into overheated young minds. For 99.9% of the people life was very hard—subsistence. The plunder was not shared equally between everybody, just a very small elite. Most people were unfree or semi-free and lived in small rural communities. In that sense, I don’t think very much changed at all. There’s no systemic change, but we do see Charlemagne trying to take care of these people in times of hunger. That is something that we don’t come across with earlier rulers. Famine happened every so often and Charlemagne developed a policy to deal with it. By fixing the price of bread and preventing the stockpiling of grain, he prevented people from making huge profits on it when famine occurred. Life didn’t change for most people, except that churches appeared more or less everywhere. Religion went local, although that is not really covered in this book. But it does explain how peasants lived and how the subsistence economy allowed for trade and sometimes even long-distance trade—though more recent research suggests that the effects of that were only felt a bit later."